Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 ashanti Jul 20, 2006 17:29:24	Can anyone tell me where the metal went? My understanding is that in the Green Age Athas was pretty much D&D typical. One of my group asked me where it all went and I mumbled something about a population explosion of Rust Monsters. This got a laugh and the point was dropped but I still wonder if there is a cannon view. Either there was not much in the past or....what?
#2 cnahumck Jul 20, 2006 18:19:32	Can anyone tell me where the metal went? My understanding is that in the Green Age Athas was pretty much D&D typical. One of my group asked me where it all went and I mumbled something about a population explosion of Rust Monsters. This got a laugh and the point was dropped but I still wonder if there is a cannon view. Either there was not much in the past or....what? The Green Age was like your typical standard world as far as metal goes, but then there was war for Millenia. As has been stated on these forums before, during WWII metal was in high demand and short supply. That war lasted less than a decade. With thousands of years of wars, and millions of deaths from nasty spells and powers, you will loose much of the metal that is around. The answer to where the metal went is that it was all mined and used and destroyed before the current age. Depending on how big your Cleansing Wars were (tablelands only, one continent, whole planet, I think I even saw someone who did some spelljammer stuff to make it interplanetary) there might be metal somewhere else that would be minable. The Kreen empire could be sitting on mountains of it, but they do not use it in their society, so would not need to mine for it. There is no cannon answer to where it went. At least not that I know of.
#3 dirk00001 Jul 21, 2006 10:05:23	As has been stated on these forums before, during WWII metal was in high demand and short supply. Woot! First different-thread reference to something I said! Maybe! And yes, everything he said. Not sure if I said it in the other thread or not, but beyond the likelyhood that most of the metal was destroyed through use, and all known sources of it depleted over the thousands of years of fighting, there's still a pretty good chance that there is a lot of metal "lost" in various parts of Athas. Any of the sandy waste regions could house unknown numbers of metal weapons and items that are simply buried deep under the blowing sands, and given that the Silt Sea was still water during the war (at the beginning at least) there's probably a large amount of metal items (albeit rusty) that were "lost at sea" during ship battles and such. Although it's not a given, there's a decent chance that a lot of fight occurred on or around bodies of water and involved "amphibious assaults" of one sort or another (look at the history of human warfare), or at least ships attacking port cities and such, and based on the descriptions in the Wanderer's Chronicle of some of the islands it seems highly likely that this happened on Athas as well. In either case, given that the silt sea is stated to have risen higher than the water sea, there could also be a decent amount of metal items found within several miles of the current shoreline. I think the WC description of ruins in the silt sea even mentions this (something about "many a lucky adventurer has made his fortune from metal items looted from silt-covered ruins").